


compartmentalizing

by firefall



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Because There's Nothing Wrong With Needing Someone, Canon Compliant, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Cuddling & Snuggling, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Violence, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post Series, Post canon, Self-Acceptance, Warning: Gerard Argent, With Aid From Others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-12 23:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18456401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firefall/pseuds/firefall
Summary: He lets Chris suffer in silence, which Chris both appreciates and understands.  Derek has almost thirty years of horror to swallow down.  The world hasn’t been kind to him, either.Which is why the unabashed care in his voice nearly takes Chris’ breath away when Derek asks quietly, “We’re okay, right?”  He says it like a plea.  Like he needs them to be okay.  It’s a far cry from the practiced control Chris usually hears from him.Chris’ face heats up.  “Of course,” he says roughly.  “Why would you ask that?”Chris and Derek after the war.





	compartmentalizing

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently this is the person I am in my old age. They're just good, y'all.
> 
> Warnings for: child abuse, homophobia, descriptions of canon deaths, and a bit of swearing. It's pretty rough at the start.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Wolf and am not profiting off this work in any way. All characters belong to Jeff Davis and MTV and a multiplicity of other cowards.

Chris is six the first time his father hits him.  They’re having Christmas on the coast at his aunt and uncle’s house, the kids contained in the basement while the adults shoot the shit upstairs and dig into the liquor cabinet.  One of Chris’ older cousins decides to paint her nails, filling the basement with the strong chemical smell of polish until they have to crack a window.  Chris watches her with barely concealed interest, eyes going a little wide at the sheer number of options she has in her makeup bag, until finally she turns to him with a grin and says, “You want me to do yours?”

He nods wordlessly.

By the time they go upstairs for Christmas dinner, his fingernails are a shimmery green.  He can’t stop looking at them, drumming his fingers against the tabletop just to watch the polish catch the light.  That is, until his dad notices and drags him away from the table by his ear.

“What is _this_?” he snarls, yanking Chris’ hand up so he can see it better.  “Who did this to you?”

“It’s just nail polish,” Chris whispers, his lower lip trembling.  “Annie did hers, too.”

“ _Annie_.”  Dad spits out the name like it tastes bad, whirling back toward the kitchen.  “She’s gonna regret—”

Terrified, Chris grabs his father by the hem of his shirt, pulling him up short before he can go scream at Annie in the middle of Christmas dinner.  Dad is angry like Chris has never seen him, chest heaving with the force of it.  “I asked her to!” he cries, feeling tears well up in his eyes.  “She was just being nice!”

The hallway is silent for a few seconds and then a sharp pain blooms on Chris’ left cheek, making him stumble backwards.  It takes a few seconds to put everything together, but when he does, Chris whimpers and cringes away.  His dad hit him.

His dad _hit_ him.

“You take that shit off immediately,” his father orders, voice low and dangerous and allowing for no argument.  “And I never want to see you made up like a girl ever again, you hear me?  Stop crying.”

Chris chokes out a broken _okay_ before racing off to the bathroom where he can be alone to do away with his shame.  The tears don’t stop until there are four green-stained cotton balls in the garbage can next to the toilet.  His face stings with a phantom pain the entire time.  It feels like the back of his father’s hand.

He does better after that, modeling himself after his boy cousins and avoiding the girls like the plague.  He learns to shoot a crossbow when he’s eight, a gun when he’s nine, and can hit a target with his ring daggers at fifteen yards when he’s ten.  It seems like empty work to Chris, but it pleases his dad so he keeps at it.  When Dad is happy, he’s not hitting anyone and that’s how Chris wants it to stay.

The day before his parents show him his first werewolf, Chris messes up big-time.  He’s at the breakfast table with his parents, babbling on about one of his classmates because he just can’t help himself.  He’s had a huge embarrassing crush on Taylor since the kid transferred a couple months ago and pretty much hasn’t shut up since.  Luckily, his parents – especially his mother – are endeared rather than annoyed, humoring him with understanding smiles and indulgent shakes of their heads.

But then Mom says, “How about you invite her over for dinner sometime?  We’d love to meet her!” and Chris just blinks at her in confusion.

“Him,” he says slowly, wondering where the wires got crossed.

“What?”

“Taylor’s a _him_ , Mom.”

The surprise on his mother’s face is apparent, but it’s nothing compared to the twitch of Dad’s jaw and the instant storm clouds that seem to roll into the room.  Chris ends up crying again, no more prepared at thirteen than he was at six, as his father sends him sprawling with a heavy-handed smack across the face.  There’s more than one this time, Chris curling up into a ball on the kitchen floor to protect his most vulnerable parts while he waits out the seemingly endless attack.  He can hear Katie bawling in her high chair.

They throw him to the wolves the very next day, like being snarled and snapped at by some horrifying creature straight out of mythology will man him up quick.  In a sick, twisted way, it actually works.  The wolf, out of its mind from the wolfsbane bullet Uncle Joe shot into its chest, lunges at Chris teeth-first and Dad tells him, voice calm and unwavering, “He can smell your tears, boy.”

Chris never cries again.

Not when Mom dies a year later, torn apart by something Dad called a wendigo, not when he shoots an arrow into his first wolf at sixteen, and not when Dad catches him in bed with the neighbor boy his senior year.  They’re not even _doing_ anything, not really, fully-clothed and upright and exchanging tentative, nervous kisses like they’re afraid the moment will be shattered at any second.  And it _is_ shattered, Dad roaring louder than any wolf Chris has ever heard and drawing his gun on Drew with intent to kill.  Chris puts himself between Drew and the barrel of the weapon, pleading with his father for mercy, for understanding, but never crying.  Never crying.

When Dad finally puts the gun down, Drew races from the house in terror and never talks to Chris again.  Chris can’t blame him.

Instead, he learns to compartmentalize, burying the hurt deep in the recesses of his brain until he can barely feel it anymore.  That’s where he puts everything that aches – guilt, shame, fear, and the embarrassing flutter in his stomach when he catches some boy looking at him from across a room.  Pretty soon he can’t feel those things, either.

Mostly he just feels rage.  He’s not sure how much of it is at himself.

Regardless of the source of it, Chris fuels that rage into becoming the hunter his father wants him to be.  He knows he’ll never be as good as his parents – and will probably be surpassed by little Katie in just a few years – but he does okay.  Well enough that his dad starts to look at him with some level of pride again.  The night he takes down his first alpha, Dad slaps him on the back in congratulations and Chris feels about ten feet tall.

He marries Victoria when he’s twenty-three and he genuinely loves her.  Being with her, even sleeping with her, is no hardship and after a while he learns to drown out the voice in the back of his head that tells him it’s a fluke.  That he’s going to wake up one day and resent her or feel sick at the thought of touching her.  That day never comes.  When he tells Victoria that she’s the only woman for him, he means it in more ways than she’ll ever know.

He loves her thoroughly and completely all the way up until he drives a knife through her heart. 

The next few years are dedicated to _un_ -compartmentalizing.  They’re years of letting the guilt and the shame bubble back up, letting them turn him into a better person.  The person that he might’ve been if he was born into a different family – a family that saw him for who he was and loved him for it.  Like Allison did.

His daughter was always the best of the Argents and when Chris feels like he just can’t go on, like he’s finally reached the end of the rope that’s been steadily fraying since he was six years old, he makes himself get back to his feet over and over.  He’ll do Allison proud even if it’s the last thing he does.

Even if it’s the _only_ thing he does.

So he goes on and he _keeps_ going on.  He joins Scott’s ragtag wolf pack and fights wars and makes unlikely allies.  And, in the end, he doesn’t stop Kate from killing their father and disappearing into the night.  A small part of him, the part that remembers all too vividly how it felt to be young and scared and so damn eager to please, feels sick about the whole thing, but the rest of him knows it had to happen.  He wasn’t strong enough to get rid of Dad, but Kate was.  Kate’s always been a better hunter than him.  That’s not something he’s jealous of anymore.

After the war, Chris follows Monroe and her hunters as they scatter in fright across the country.  This time he’s not alone, though – this time he has Derek.  As they travel, keeping to the back roads so Derek can full shift without danger, Chris notes with dread that it isn’t just guilt and shame that has flooded back to him in recent years.  The flutters in his stomach and the ache in his chest are back, too, and it fucking terrifies him.  He doesn’t know what to do.

Most days he can’t even look at Derek, focusing on some point over his left shoulder or down by Derek’s feet, always bare and dirty once he’s shifted back to his human form.  It’s safer.  And after the absolute shitshow of the past forty-six years of his life, Chris needs a little safe.

Derek doesn’t call him on it for almost three weeks.  He lets Chris suffer in silence, which Chris both appreciates and understands.  Derek has almost thirty years of his own to swallow down.  The world hasn’t been kind to him, either.

Which is why the unabashed _care_ in his voice nearly takes Chris’ breath away when Derek asks quietly, “We’re okay, right?”  He says it like a plea.  Like he _needs_ them to be okay.  It’s a far cry from the practiced control Chris usually hears from him.

Chris’ face heats up.  “Of course,” he says roughly, eyes trained stubbornly on the nozzle as he slides it into the tank.  It’s the third time they’ve had to gas up since setting out that morning.  It’s a good thing Derek has pretty much bottomless resources.  “Why would you ask that?”

“Because we don’t _feel_ okay,” Derek says, punctuating it with a deep sigh.  “It feels like you don’t want me here.  Which is pretty stupid considering you can’t track as well as I do.”

It’s such a Derek thing to say that Chris can’t help but snort a laugh, his first since Derek had slid into the passenger seat and Chris felt his heart lurch in his chest all those weeks ago.  He glances up despite himself and his entire body goes warm at the grin on Derek’s face.  Realizing that Derek had been trying to make him laugh is overwhelming and terrible all at once.  _Shit_. 

“I want you here,” Chris says finally, hoping Derek will attribute the pounding of his heart to anything but the truth.  “I want—”

His voice breaks on the statement and he can’t go on, more embarrassed than he’s been in years.  Luckily, Derek takes it in stride, reaching out to cup a gentle hand around the back of Chris’ neck for just a fleeting moment before he pulls back again.  “It’s okay,” he assures Chris softly, voice gentle with a mixture of concern and understanding.  “ _You’re_ okay.  There’s nothing wrong with you.”

The ghostly stinging sensation that tingles against Chris’ left cheek says otherwise, but he doesn’t argue.  He just nods, swallows hard, and twists the gas cap back on.

They don’t talk again until they stop for the night, getting a single room with two beds as usual.  Chris thinks it’s going to be like any other night, orbiting around each other without ever colliding and then mumbling sleepy _g’night_ ’s before drifting off, Chris’ gun next to his pillow and the door double locked.  But this time Derek falls to his knees next to Chris’ bed with his hands folded loosely on top of the duvet and just watches.

It’s nearly five minutes before Chris gathers enough courage to shift his gaze from Derek’s hands to his face.

When he does, he’s instantly reminded of why he’d been avoiding it for so long: Derek’s eyes are wide and green and intent and Chris’ chest goes so tight he can barely breathe.  “What are you doing?” he manages to croak out, his insides breaking into a thousand tiny pieces.  He knows the room must be thick with the smell of his turmoil, but Derek doesn’t call attention to it.  Chris is beyond grateful for that – not every werewolf would be so kind.  “Derek?”

“I’m waiting to see if you’ll lie down with me,” Derek says simply, like it’s just that easy, and Chris’ eyes fill with tears for the first time in thirty-three years.  This time Derek does react, his nostrils flaring at the sudden scent of salt in the air and his eyes getting impossibly wider.  He’s worried.  “It’s okay,” he says again, voice taking on a desperate tinge.  Like he’s realizing for the first time just how fucked up Chris is and that he might not be able to fix it.  “I’m not gonna come up there unless you ask, but I want you to know that it’s okay.”

The words have as much comfort in them as a guy like Derek can manage and Chris gives a single jerk of a nod before he can chicken out.  It makes Derek break into a small smile, pulling himself to his feet to then slide beneath the covers next to Chris.  He’s warm, so fucking _warm_ , and Chris shudders.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Derek repeats, not recycling his words from before but offering them again as a gift.  This time Chris reaches out and takes them.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

There’s so much between them, so much more than the roughly ten inches of bed between their bodies, and suddenly Chris feels all of it in minute detail.  They’ve both lost family to each other, but they’ve _gained_ family, too.  It doesn’t cancel out, but it’s enough.  Somehow, for right now, it’s enough.

So Chris whispers, voice shaky, “You can lie down with me.”

Derek has always been smart – too smart, maybe – and he reads between the lines, closing the distance between them until he can drape an arm over Chris’ chest and hold him tight.  Then he drums his fingers lazily against Chris’ side and lets his eyes fall shut. 

Finally, in the moonlit darkness of the hotel room, Chris lets himself look at Derek until he has his fill.  When his heart dances in his chest, he doesn’t fight it down.  There’s nothing wrong with him.  It’s okay.

And when Derek kisses him in the morning, hesitating just a hairsbreadth from Chris’ lips to get permission, nothing shatters the moment.  Not even Chris.   

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading <3


End file.
